Ethereality

Commission:BEAST with support from Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst

Ethereality oscillates between the natural world of everyday sounds/objects/relationships and something more philosophical. Ethereality presents its material (natural,human and synthetic) as a hazy mix, using the possibilities of 8 channel space to intersect or fuse real and synthetic environments.

I reflected upon the words amalgamated in the title: Ether / Ethereal / Real / Reality. Always on the back of my mind was my initial idea for a trilogy of works which began with Junky, Dreamarena and has ended with Ethereality.

The soundscapes in this composition are abstracted for their anecdotal value only and their ‘sense of place’ is confused by the immersion of objects in a sea of background material such that the perception of background and foreground becomes meaningless.

I subsequently drew upon a reading of anyone lived in a pretty how town by E E Cummings read by Mary Bellamy, which resonates with the metaphors in Ethereality. anyone lived in a pretty how town is, if nothing else, a poem that allows the reader to move within a series of continuums. The course of the poem is an ambivalent excursion from life and love to sex and death. ‘anyone’ and ‘noone’ are both real and fictional at the same time. Their (anyone and noone) intersection seems futile, goes unnoticed and comments upon our daily / yearly routines that shroud us from events that we should be actively seeking. Ethereality presents the listener with a feast of unnoticed sounds.

Ethereality was composed in 2000 at The University of Sheffield Sound Studios (USSS) (UK). It was commissioned by BEAST with funds from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. The lines from anyone lived in a pretty how town from Complete Poems: 1904-1962, by E E Cummings, edited by George J Firmage, are used with permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.